von Sternberg, Josef

International Dictionary of Films and Filmmakers
COPYRIGHT 2001 The Gale Group Inc.

von STERNBERG, Josef

Nationality: Austrian. Born: Jonas Sternberg in Vienna, 19 May 1894. Education: Educated briefly at Jamaica High School, Queens, New York, returned to Vienna to finish education. Family: Married 1) Riza Royce, 1926 (divorced 1930); 2) Jeanne Annette McBride, 1943, two children. Career: Film patcher for World Film Co. in Fort Lee, New Jersey, 1911; joined U.S. Army Signal Corps to make training films, 1917; scenarist and assistant for several directors, 1918–24; attached "von" to his name at suggestion of actor Elliot Dexter, 1924; directed first film, The Salvation Hunters, then signed eight-picture contract with MGM (terminated after two abortive projects), 1925; directed The Sea Gull for Charlie Chaplin (Chaplin did not release it), 1926; director for Paramount, 1926–35; began collaboration with Marlene Dietrich on Der blaue Engel, made for UFA in Berlin, 1930; attempted to direct I, Claudius for Alexander Korda in England, 1937 (not completed); made documentary The Town for U.S. Office of War Information, 1941; taught class in film direction, University of Southern California, 1947. Awards: George Eastman House Medal of Honor, 1957; honorary member, Akademie der Künste, Berlin, 1960. Died: 22 December 1969.

On von STERNBERG: film—

The Epic That Never Was—"I, Claudius," directed by Bill Duncalf, for BBC-TV, London, 1966.

* * *

There is a sense in which Josef von Sternberg never grew up. In his personality, the twin urges of the disturbed adolescent towards self-advertisement and self-effacement fuse with a brilliant visual imagination to create an artistic vision unparalleled in the cinema. But von Sternberg lacked the cultivation of Murnau, the sophistication of his mentor von Stroheim, the humanity of Griffith, or the ruthlessness of Chaplin. His imagination remained immature, and his personality was malicious and obsessive. His films reflect a schoolboy's fascination with sensuality and heroics. That they are sublime visual adventures from an artist who contributed substantially to the sum of cinema technique is one paradox to add to the stock that make up his career.

Much of von Sternberg's public utterance, and in particular his autobiography, was calculated to confuse; the disguise of his real Christian name under the diminutive "Jo" is typical. Despite his claims to have done so, he did not "write" all his films, though he did re-write the work of some skilled collaborators, notably Jules Furthman and Ben Hecht. While his eye for art and design was highly developed, he never designed sets; he merely "improved" them with props, veils, nets, posters, scribbles, but above all with light. Of this last he was a natural master, the only director of his day to earn membership in the American Society of Cinematographers. Given a set, a face, a camera, and some lights, he could create a mobile portrait of breathtaking beauty.

Marlene Dietrich was his greatest model. He dressed her like a doll, in a variety of costumes that included feathers and sequins, a gorilla suit, a tuxedo, and a succession of gowns by Paramount's master of couture, Travis Banton. She submitted to his every demand with the skill and complaisance of a great courtesan. No other actress provided him with such malleable material. With Betty Compson, Gene Tierney, and Akemi Negishi he fitfully achieved the same "spiritual power," as he called the mood of yearning melancholy which was his ideal, but the effect never equalled that of the seven Dietrich melodramas.

Von Sternberg was born too early for the movies. The studio system constrained his fractious temperament; the formula picture stifled his urge to primp and polish. He battled with MGM, which offered him a lucrative contract after the success of his von Stroheimesque expressionist drama The Salvation Hunters, fell out with Chaplin, producer of the still-suppressed Woman of the Sea, and fought constantly with Paramount until Ernst Lubitsch, acting studio head, "liquidated" him for his intransigence; the later suppression of his last Paramount film, The Devil Is a Woman, in a political dispute with Spain merely served to increase von Sternberg's alienation.

For the rest of his career, von Sternberg wandered from studio to studio and country to country, always lacking the facilities he needed to achieve his best work. Even Korda's lavish I Claudius, dogged by disaster and finally terminated in a cost-cutting exercise, shows in its surviving footage only occasional flashes of Sternbergian brilliance. By World War II, he had already achieved his best work, though he lived for another 30 years.

Von Sternberg alarmed a studio establishment whose executives thought in terms of social and sexual stereotypes, formula plotting, and stock happy endings; their narrative ideal was a Saturday Evening Post novelette. No storyteller, von Sternberg derided plot; "the best source for a film is an anecdote," he said. From a single coincidence and a handful of characters, edifices of visual poetry could be constructed. His films leap years in the telling to follow a moral decline or growth of an obsession.

The most important film of von Sternberg's life was one he never made. After the humiliation of the war years, when he produced only the propaganda short The Town, and the nadir of his career, as closeup advisor to King Vidor on Duel in the Sun, he wrote The Seven Bad Years, a script that would, he said, "demonstrate the adult insistence to follow the pattern inflicted on a child in its first seven helpless years, from which a man could extricate himself were he to realize that an irresponsible child was leading him into trouble." He was never to make this work of self-analysis, nor any film which reflected a mature understanding of his contradictory personality.

Von Sternberg's theories of cinema were not especially profound, deriving largely from the work of Reinhardt, but they represented a quantum jump in an industry where questions of lighting and design were dealt with by experts who jealously guarded this prerogative. In planning his films not around dialogue but around the performers' "dramatic encounter with light," in insisting that the "dead space" between the camera and subject be filled and enlivened, and above all in seeing every story in terms of "spiritual power" rather than star quality, he established a concept of personal cinema which presaged the politique des auteurs and the Movie Brat generation.

In retrospect, von Sternberg's contentious personality—manifested in the self-conscious affecting of uniforms and costumes on the set and an epigrammatic style of communicating with performers that drove many of them to frenzy—all reveal themselves as reactions against the banality of his chosen profession. von Sternberg was asked late in life if he had a hobby. "Yes. Chinese philately." Why that? "I wanted," he replied in the familiar weary, uninflected voice, "a subject I could not exhaust."

—John Baxter

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Von Sternberg, Joseph

The Columbia Encyclopedia, 6th ed.

Copyright The Columbia University Press

Joseph Von Sternberg (Jo Sternberg), 1894–1969, Austrian-American film director and screenwriter. Von Sternberg, who worked in the United States from 1925, made films that were noted for their dazzling visual impact and attention to physical detail. His early works include The Salvation Hunters (1925), Underworld (1927), and Docks of New York (1928). His masterpiece was The Blue Angel (1930) with Emil Jannings and Marlene Dietrich, made in Germany. The film depicts, with a dreadful intimacy and a striking control of contrasting atmospheres, a stuffy professor's desire for a nightclub singer and his subsequent shattering humiliation. Von Sternberg directed Dietrich in several other films (including Morocco, 1930; Shanghai Express, 1932; and The Devil Is a Woman, 1935) and thereby fashioned her enduring screen image. Von Sternberg wrote most of his films' screenplays, relying in later years on romantic formulas. Among his later films are Jet Pilot (1950) and Macao (1951).

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